Ballard Asks: Should the City Own Its Own Water?
On the eve of a $75,000 bond vote, Ballard weighs a public water works against the private company that holds the taps — and the mills that built their own supply rather than wait.
Today an election will be held at the hose house in the city of Ballard to ratify or reject a proposition to bond the city for $75,000 for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a system of water works and building an electric light plant. The judges of the election are George Webber and A. McCulloch, and the inspector is Abraham Kilworth.
If the city be bonded it is proposed to use $50,000 for constructing and maintaining a source of water supply known as the Wagner Steam Excavated Well system, a detailed description of which has already been published in the POST-INTELLIGENCER. The balance of the amount will be used for the electric light plant.
The proposed system has a number of earnest advocates, who have been agitating the system for a number of months, but it is also opposed by many on the grounds that the supply is not needed and that the system may not prove satisfactory.
The question of water supply has been a subject of consideration by every council since the incorporation of the city, and the only result attained is the present proposition to bond the city. There are two systems at present. One is a gravity system, owned by the West Coast Improvement Company, which supplies a number of residents and three mills — Sullivan's, the Eagle and the Gilman Park Lumber Company's. The city council refused to grant a franchise to the West Coast Improvement Company or any other company, and no extensions or improvements in the original system laid by the West Coast Improvement Company before the incorporation of the city have been made. Enough water could not be obtained to supply all the mills by this system, and the other system was constructed by the Stimson Mill Company, the West Coast Manufacturing Company and the Seattle Cedar Lumber Company. It required no franchise from the city, as the pipes ran along the tide flats to Lake Union, where there is a pumping station. This cost about $14,000, and the monthly expense of running it is about $150, divided among the three companies controlling the system. This system can supply all the new mills and the old ones, too, with all the water they require at a cheap monthly rate, or they will allow any new mill to become a stockholder in their water works company.
“The question of water supply has been a subject of consideration by every council since the incorporation of the city, and the only result attained is the present proposition to bond the city.”
Ballard's fight to own its own water — rather than grant a franchise to a private company — is an early chapter in a debate Seattle is still having about who controls public utilities and who pays for growth. The mills that quietly built private systems while residents demanded a public one were already asking the question every utility district faces today: should the town own the pipes, or rent them?
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